How Long?

I am on my 4th week of working out and eating right. I have gained about 8Lbs. I feel like my stomach is bigger. It is hard, but I feel fat. My partner said he can see muscle changes in my arms and chest. My question is how long after you start working out on a regular basis, does it take to really see results? Now that my stomach is hard will it start shrinking soon?

GeorgeE saidI am on my 4th week of working out and eating right. I have gained about 8Lbs. I feel like my stomach is bigger. It is hard, but I feel fat. My partner said he can see muscle changes in my arms and chest. My question is how long after you start working out on a regular basis, does it take to really see results? Now that my stomach is hard will it start shrinking soon?

Well george thats the problem i have hard stomach but looks fat? Sit ups seem to make it worse i think lipo is the answer boo hoo hoo ?Also age?

A watched pot never boils. If you keep looking for results, you'll never notice them and run the risk of giving up in frustration. Save your comparisons for every 6 months or so. There are probably millions of people who go to their first Weight Watchers meeting expecting to leave thin and then never go back.

It typically takes quite a while. Also, the more gradual your results (whether it be weight loss or muscle gain), the more likely you will be able to maintain them. Fitness, like many things, is often an exercise in extreme patience. The key is to stay focused and consistent.

I'm not a doctor (but I play one on TV), but sounds like the hard "fat" belly is a sign of excess internal fat in and around the organs. That's the bad/worse fat as I understand it since it directly impacts your organs and internal functions. It just happens that your body stores it internally instead of having the jiggly external kind. Weight loss is the same, though: high protein, low fat, lots of cardio.

It's actually possible that you have fat underneath your muscles and so liposuction is not going to help you. In this case you will need to work on losing the fat through diet and exercise. Remember, the last place a man loses fat from on his body is his stomach and this is the first place that the fat is deposited too.

There is an organ called the Omentum, it stores fat inside the abdominal cavity around the organs. which is why the belly feels hard, the fat is under the muscle. Instead of soft bellies which have fat between the abs and the skin.High levels of stress (actually the resulting hormone cortisol) are one of the main reasons the omentum stores extra fat. Having extra fat in the omentum, throws your body chemistry (insulin, blood cholesterol and triglyceride levels are all affected)off by feeding that fat to the liver and other internal organs.Thank you Dr. Oz.

My partner was trying to lose weight, on and off, for 3 years. He tried doing weights with me, because I told him that building muscle would help his body to burn fat for him (and speed up his metabolism). He did the weights for a couple of weeks, and said that he wasn't losing any weight, and that he looked bigger. He stuck to running, again on and off, for 3 years, and didn't lose much weight. He would run for about 30 minutes at a time.

In January, he started to see a personal trainer. She told him to keep a food log, so that she could review it and make suggestions. I think this really helped. He basically eats around 1500 calories a day. She also told him that to lose 1LB of fat per week, he had to burn about 3500 calories a week. He burns about 1000 calories for a 1 hour run, so he has to do 3.5 hours of running each week to make that work. He also does body weight exercises with the trainer twice a week, to build up his muscles. He actually gets in about 1 or maybe 2 one hour runs per week, plus we have been hiking lately and playing squash. Overall, I'm guessing he burns 4000+ calories a week. He's been losing about 1.5 pounds a week for months, and went from 22-25% body fat down to 16-18%.

The point? My partner was doing some work and thinking it was enough and getting upset that he wasn't losing weight. After seeing the trainer, he knows now that he wasn't doing enough work, was eating too much, and was doing some of the wrong type of work.

I have a couple of suggestions for you:

1) See a personal trainer. This is probably the best way to do things. They will tell you what you need to know, follow up with you to make sure that you did what you said, push you to do more, and tell you when you're not doing enough. That is, if they are good. If they don't do what I just said, find another trainer, immediately.

2) Spend some time evaluating how much you eat each week vs how many calories you are burning each week. If calories out is smaller than calories in, you will most definitely not lose weight (fat or otherwise).

Whether that's a sentence or a new lease on life to you will determine if you're gonna stick to it or let it all go by the wayside

working out and eating right esp as we guys get older is a lifestyleyeah you're gonna gain some weight but don't look at thatpeople are already saying that they notice differencesThat's what you should go byand what you see in the mirrorEventually - you're going to get off on working out(not really the right term there)but there will be mental changes where your body will send signals to your brain that .. hey, we like what's going on down there...let's do it again